The first time I saw the image above, I thought someone at Blizzard had been watching too much Kung Fu Panda, and I still think that. The picture here is blatant leaner, meaner version of Po. If you are a big fan of the game, Blizzard promises that Mists isn’t the last expansion pack for the aging franchise.

In fact, Blizzard COO Paul Sams says that the fifth expansion pack to come sometime after Mists is already in the development stages. Rest assured as long as World of Warcraft is raking in the money, Blizzard will continue to make more expansion packs.

[via VR-Zone]

The madness didn’t stop there: other items auctioned off by Snail Games “included a sheath for Hook of Departure which was sold for $1,600 whilst a a Lordly Spear Sheath fetched $2,500. Other relatively modest purchases were made with pre-paid time cards amounting to just $15 whilst enhancement materials went for a mere $30.Meanwhile, rare mount that characters can take advantage of in the game cost an estimated $70 during the sale.” Suddenly that Diablo 3 Auction House makes a lot more sense.

…

Seriously though, how did we get to this? Are we that bored and sheltered that our priorities are now so skewed and misplaced? Or does that sword deal one-hit kills while leaving a trail of unicorn-riding strips of bacon in its wake?

[via Daily Mail via Slash Gear]

Not only that but players are also putting in an average of five hours a day in the game, totaling 28 million hours logged. Here are still more crazy numbers. 3.8 million characters have been created, over 1 million of which are famous light saber users.

And in case you are wondering about the Light Side versus Dark Side stats, as it stands now, Sith Warriors outnumber Jedi Knights; 550,000 to 510,000. Plus, over 2 billion NPCs have already died in The Old Republic. Yes, I think it’s safe to say that they have a hit on their hands.

[via Shacknews via Geek]

The game will require a constant internet connection and there is no offline mode. You can only play online as you can in World of Warcraft. There will be no single player missions to learn on as there were in the past Diablo titles. The bigger bad news is that Blizzard has specifically disallowed game mods and bots. That means no hacks for new game play sadly.

The final bit of bad news is that all of the items in the online auction houses will be sold for real world money. That means rather than farming for gold and making loot killing things, you will have to get out your wallet. There are locks in place though that prevents low-level characters from just buying the best weapons. Some items are locked to specific level characters.

[via Rockpapershotgun]

Razer’s Old Republic keyboard is the real winner among the bunch, with its built-in multitouch track pad, and a cool color LCD screen underneath it. It’s also got 10 color LCD buttons right above it. They can be mapped or programmed with macros. Each of the buttons can have custom graphics. The keyboard also offers multi-color LED lighting around the perimeter.

The keyboard looks pretty awesome, assuming it works with other applications and games and isn’t too expensive.

Click to View Embedded Video Clip

The mouse is a Jedi-themed variant of Razer’s Naga MMO mouse, including 12 programmable buttons on the side. Razer will also sell a headset, which looks a bit odd with its hexagon-shaped headphones.

All three of these peripherals will come with alternative decorative plates, so you can be either a Sith or a Jedi.

[via CrunchGear]

I haven’t seen all of Cooper’s pictures, and even if I did I doubt that that would provide enough evidence for us to create generalizations about MMORPG gamers, even if we classified them into subcategories like age, gender, nationality or game of choice. Nonetheless, it’s interesting to see gamers alongside their avatars. Some of them leverage the character creation process to create avatars that look nothing like them, while others use it to project themselves as accurately as possible into the virtual worlds of their chosen games.

But most importantly, for me these pictures are good metaphors of the ever increasing influence of technology in our lives, as well as the act of transferring ourselves into an interactive medium, which is quite amazing or terrifying or both if you think about it. We started with sketches, paintings, sculptures and diaries, then photographs, audio and video recording. Now we have slices of our identity – sometimes highly fictionalized, whether unintentionally or intentionally – in social media websites, blogs and of course video games, where we store and even recreate parts of ourselves that, for better or for worse, are interactive and modifiable at almost any time. Makes you wonder how future generations will define the concept of identity.

You can check out more pictures at the link below or at Robbie Cooper’s website. Better yet, buy the book where Cooper placed his pictures together with notes from the gamers that he featured. The book is titled Alter Ego and was made by Cooper in collaboration with Tracy Spaight. You can get it on Amazon for about $23 (USD).

[via Golem13 via Reddit]

Above is a partial picture of Club Neverdie. Now here’s the mind blowing thing about this sale: like most games in the genre, Planet Calypso – part of the mega MMOG Entropia Universe – lets players earn virtual currency. In Calypso, players can mine, set up shops, and own property which can be rented, thus earning the owner virtual currency. But unlike other MMORPGs, Calypso also lets players exchange their virtual currency to real world money for a fixed rate.

So we don’t know whether Pesok paid Neverdie in virtual currency or cold hard cash, but even if Pesok did pay the $335,000 using virtual currency, Neverdie can cash that out to real money, which might not be enough to buy a real asteroid, but is surely more than enough reward for playing a video game. If that’s not enough, he sold off a dozen other domed virtual complexes for a total of $300,000, bringing his total payday to $635,000. Good god.

Check out Entropia Planets for more details on the sale.

[via Edge via Geekologie]

As you can see, the leveling curve in Guild Wars 2 is actually a line. Cartwright explains, “We expect content—not long, grindy progression—to be the deciding factor that keeps people playing our game. We want everyone to stick with Guild Wars 2 because our content is fun and enjoyable, not out of some dogged determination to slowly, slowly advance.”

Guild Wars 2: it’s not the size of your experience bar, it’s how much you enjoy the experience. Read Cartwright’s full post here.

[via Reddit]

5 Minute MMORPG works exactly as advertised. The browser-based Flash game lets you go online against other live players (okay, 10 simultaneous players isn’t really massive), and play as one of over 30 different characters. And you can level all the way up to Lvl. 80 in under 5 minutes, guaranteed! The game even includes something else you’re almost sure to get in other MMOs – simulated lag.

So if you’ve got 5 minutes to spare, check out the game right now. I only had enough patience to get to Lvl. 26 before giving up, but I have a really short attention span.

[via 4 color rebellion]

Hacked together by Zhek Kromtor, his computing rig is used for playing multiple rounds of EVE Online simultaneously. It looks like he’s able to play 12 games at once, thanks to his giant multi-mouse and multi-keyboards, held together with dowels, and tape.

Apparently Kromtor was banned by EVE because they thought he was using software macros to hack into the game. But using multiple actual computers isn’t against the games’ terms of service, so that should do the trick.

Frankly, I can’t imagine anything in EVE that would make me build something like this, but Kromtor deserves a pat on the back for his MacGyver-like ingenuity, and anyone who works this hard to push the boundaries of the rules deserves a gold star in my book.

[via Gossip Gamer]

The status bar at the bottom of the picture above shows actions that have been queued – flying, refueling, trading etc. These actions take time; in the case of the picture above the player must wait more than an hour before the queue is completed. Unless you prefer staring at that screen for long periods of time, you can simply hide or even close the tab or window where you’ve got Skyrates loaded and do something else – a bit of actual work perhaps?

But not all of the actions in Skyrate force the player to wait. For starters, you can patrol or take on missions to battle pirates in real-time, as shown above. Dogfighting in Skyrates is a game unto itself. There are planes and character skills devoted to this aspect of the game. Another huge aspect of the game is trading:

To put it simply, you buy goods where there’s a high supply and then fly off to sell them where there’s high demand. As I’ve said before, flying between the floating islands takes time, but this just means that you can earn money without having to grind. As you progress through the game, you”ll have to choose which aspect to focus on – will you buy a plane that’s slow but has lots of room for cargo, or a flying armory that barely has any room for goods? The same goes for your avatar’s skills; the skill trees are grouped into several categories – aerial moves, trading, and fighting.

You can do a lot more in Skyrates, but as I said, the game has its own pace. It’s perfect for people who don’t really have a lot of time to play but don’t want to settle for puzzlers or hack and slash games that end quickly. It’s free to play, so if you have the patience to be a Skyrate, just register and you’ll be flying your first CR-4P in no time at all. And then you’ll have to wait.

Now it’s a little sadder, actually, getting a glimpse of what was. What will it be like to explore the surface of a planet you know will eventually poof in a spectacular display of cruelty? Guess we won’t be getting too attached to anything.

I’m thinking that’s going to be a little difficult, though. At least I’ll be waiting a while for the impending sadness; BioWare’s MMO effort isn’t scheduled for release any time in the near future.

[via Joystiq]

And bam! It delivers… and by delivers, I mean beams your crew down into adventure galore. In Star Trek Online, every player will have their own ship and will be able to explore and fight in space and – as you can see – planetside via missions and other aspects of the game. You’ll even have NPC redshirts to sacrifice. What would a Star Trek universe be without some folks who are just slated to die?

Unfortunately, the only parameters we have on release are that it’s due sometime before 2012, which means it won’t be available soon enough.

[via Gamekyo]

Someone posted the video at YouTube, but unfortunately it’s been taken down. But I heard that Square Enix have heard a lot of negative feedback about leveling up and grinding in the slave-driver that is Final Fantasy XI. I mean we’re talking about a game that has a boss that cannot be defeated even after 18 hours of combat. A virtual enemy that actually caused real status effects on players – that’s how much of an asshat FF XI is. So Square Enix are dialing back on the tedious and obsolete experience point system, and they’re replacing XP with the Bills & Coins system. As in if you want to level up, you pay a certain amount of money to Square Enix. I’m kidding again. Seriously, for real this time, Komoto said, “We believe the main factor behind Final Fantasy XI’s lasting appeal is the job system. However, the system will become something completely different. The focus here will be on weapons. Your weapon will determine how you play. Your weapon will determine how you fight.” Ummm….hasn’t that always been the case?

Sorry for being so negative about this game, but after reading at Kotaku that the races from FF XI were merely renamed for FF XIV, I’m not too confident that this this newfangled “NO XP” system will be a totally different beast. Also, I don’t like MMORPGs in general. Now if someone made a Massively Single Player RPG, I’d be all over that.

[via Destructoid]

Inside, the eatery is a love song to Blizzard’s MMORPG, with recreations of armor and other loot, and giant screens blasting in-game images while diners order food named after WoW characters. It’s a haven for anyone who can’t get enough (if, that is, you can leave the house to get there), and according to the owner, that feeling of shared fandom is exactly what he was going for with the restaurant.

Considering China’s official position on intellectual property, it’s doubtful the establishment has any sort of sanction. We should probably all be grateful the restaurants won’t be spreading all over the world.

[CCTV via WoWInsider via Game|Life]